Pronouns have become extremely divisive
One of the most effective television ads last year during Donald Trump's campaign for president warned voters: 'Kamala is for they/them, not you." Less than two weeks after taking office in January, Mr Trump ordered federal employees to remove their preferred pronouns from their email signatures. Videos of lawmakers deliberately addressing their peers with the wrong pronouns subsequently went viral. Parts of speech that used to star mainly in grammar lessons have become controversial political lightning rods.
A new book gives a timely and engaging tour of an overlooked patch of linguistic history. John McWhorter, the author, is a linguist at Columbia University, columnist for the New York Times and author of more than 20 books on language and culture. This book's title, along with Mr McWhorter's heterodox views and pugnacity (he is an old-school liberal and has been outspoken on the excesses of the woke left), might lead readers to expect some culture-war bomb-throwing.
Instead, he delivers an erudite jaunt in five chapters, one each for: 'I", 'you", 'we", 'he/she/it" and 'they". These words carry a heavy load. Other languages, for instance, have separate words for 'me and you", 'me and them" and 'me and those three"; English has just 'we". Unlike many other languages, English has no second-person plural. Words such as 'y'all", 'youse" or the lovely western Pennsylvania 'yinz" remain spoken and informal. 'You" was once plural, but with the decline of 'thou", once the second-person singular, it now assumes both roles.
Mr McWhorter is no stickler for propriety—a linguist, in his view, describes rather than prescribes—and he delights in slaying sacred cows. He argues, for instance, that the prohibition against saying 'Joe and me went to lunch" is 'English's fakest rule", because pronouns do not split into subjects and objects as neatly as rule-makers believe. Consider the answer to 'Who left the door open?" It might sound odd to say 'I" rather than 'Me", even though 'I" is the subject pronoun.
He also revels in pointing out the randomness of linguistic development. The familiar 'she" could have just as easily been 'hoo", 'oo", 'sho" or 'shoo" had English gone down a slightly different path. Dominant languages tend to simplify as they absorb speakers of other languages—a process doubtless helped by the de facto standardisation imposed by film, television and other forms of mass communication—but superficial simplicity can mask subtlety. The first-person plural in 'We're going out tonight", said to a friend, is not the same thing as a waiter asking, 'And what will we be having tonight?" The former is warm and inclusive, the latter faux-friendly and cloying.
Unlike nouns and verbs, pronouns usually evolve glacially. Anglophones have been using their tidy little set for centuries. But change is not impossible. In Sweden 'hen", a gender-neutral pronoun, jumped from academic circles to general use around ten years ago.
Near the end of the book, Mr McWhorter breaks his own rule against prescription and argues staunchly in favour of adopting the singular, gender-neutral 'they". He points out that it has been around for centuries: Geoffrey Chaucer used it, as did Jane Austen. The context is new; the usage is old. Some may grumble at the change, but some grumbled at the loss of 'thou" several centuries back, and people eventually got used to it.
The most enjoyable part of reading this romp through tiny words is the obvious joy Mr McWhorter takes in telling it. In discussing the most staid words in English, he touches on music and wine. In asides, footnotes and parentheses, he is informal and catty: the effect is of listening to a delightful dinner-party guest. As for his subject, he reminds readers at the end that the story of pronouns, and of language more broadly, is never complete: 'Pronouns are the latest stage in something always changing…Our job is to adjust to the inevitable awkwardness of change, in our pronouns as in ourselves."
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Printing pages from within the walls of the college By the late 1870s, Oriental College Lahore had become a publishing institution in its own right. It published textbooks, lecture notes, dictionaries, and annotated editions of classical works. Scholars such as Shibli Nomani and Altaf Hussain Hali participated in lectures and editorial boards. The college invited Sanskritists, Arabic grammarians, Persian historians and Urdu poets to contribute to its curriculum. Shibli Nomani, later a foundational figure in modern Muslim thought, studied Arabic at the college and was involved in grammar book committees. European scholars such as Georg Thibaut, a Sanskritist and principal of the college, encouraged comparative philology. One striking example of the college's reach is its attraction of international scholars. Among them was MAR Barker, an American linguist and professor of Urdu, who studied at Punjab University and later directed the South Asian Studies department at the University of Minnesota. Barker authored several Urdu grammars and even created a fictional language for his academic fantasy novels. His time at the college highlights its global footprint. The college also hosted debates within the pages of its journal. One early entry debated whether regional languages were to be simplified to serve bureaucracy or enriched to serve poetry. Another considered whether Hindi and Urdu were different languages or different registers of the same linguistic field. The articles of the journal from these meetings suggest that no consensus was ever reached, but that the act of debating itself was pedagogical. IV. Post‑Partition and the Urdu Conference In the immediate aftermath of Partition, Oriental College Lahore became one of the few institutions in Pakistan with a documented multilingual legacy. Its archives still held materials in Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic, Urdu, and Persian. But institutional shifts began to narrow this scope. A final All‑Pakistan Urdu Conference was held at the college in 1948 – the last great institutional mobilisation around regional language education at the institution. The conference resolutions called for Urdu to be made the national language but also called for continued respect for regional languages. Reports from the event note that Sanskrit was no longer taught, that Hindi publications were discontinued and that most editorial committees were now Urdu-only. Still, the conference served as a closing note in the college's long history of multilingualism. The college's history serves as a moment when past ambitions were remembered, even if no longer realised. Conclusion The clarion calls for regional universities were heard in surrounding provinces as well. In the late 1860s, similar petitions emerged in Delhi, Lucknow, and Bhopal. But it was Lahore that became the testing ground for regional language education as an institutional model. What Oriental College Lahore offered was not an answer to colonialism, but a reorientation within it. The grammar books, petitions, lectures, and jalsa minutes were not marginal to the education system but were its very blueprint. They proposed that languages could coexist without hierarchy, that students could be trained in ethics without English, and that debate and pedagogy itself was a political act.
